Annie Andrews flips South Carolina Senate seat in stunning upset over Darline Graham
Democrat Annie Andrews has defeated Republican Darline Graham in South Carolina, becoming the first Democrat to win a US Senate race there since 1998 and the first woman ever elected to the Senate from the state.
Democrat Annie Andrews has pulled off one of the biggest upsets of the 2026 midterm elections, defeating Republican Darline Graham to capture the US Senate seat in South Carolina, a state long regarded as a Republican stronghold.
The Associated Press called the race for Andrews, a paediatrician, with the final count putting her on 1,033,282 votes to Graham’s 947,521, with 99.78 per cent of precincts reporting. Decision Desk HQ and NBC had also called the race for Andrews less than three hours after the polls closed on Tuesday.
The result breaks a drought stretching back nearly three decades. Andrews is the first Democrat to win a Senate race in South Carolina since 1998, when Fritz Hollings won his final term, and the first woman ever elected to the US Senate from the Palmetto State.
It is also a striking result in a state that President Donald Trump carried by 18 percentage points just two years ago. Andrews, 45 and a mother of three, had been written off by many analysts at the start of the race, but polls showed the contest tied in its final days as Republicans struggled to unite behind Trump’s chosen candidate.
The seat had become vacant in unusual and sombre circumstances. Longtime Republican Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly on 11 July at the age of 71, and his younger sister Darline was appointed by Governor Henry McMaster to serve out the remainder of his term. She went on to win a special primary runoff for the Republican nomination with Trump’s endorsement.
Andrews had launched her campaign in May 2025 to challenge Lindsey Graham, before his death transformed the race. During the primary, Darline Graham acknowledged that she was not that well informed on national security, a remark her opponents seized on, and the general election became a test of whether a political newcomer carrying a famous name could hold one of the party’s safest seats.
Money poured into the contest from both sides. Andrews outraised Graham by more than $22 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings, much of it from grassroots donations, while Republican outside groups spent $27 million trying to hold the seat and Democratic groups invested $24 million in flipping it.
On election night, Andrews told supporters that they had just made history, a line that captured both the scale of the upset and its symbolism: a Democratic paediatrician winning in a state where her party had not won a Senate race in the lifetime of many of her voters.
The flip matters for the balance of the Senate. Democrats entered the midterms needing a net gain of four seats to overturn the Republicans’ 53–47 majority, and South Carolina — a seat few had counted among their realistic targets — suddenly became one of the night’s most consequential gains.
What comes next will test whether the result was a one-off product of an extraordinary vacancy or the start of something larger in the South. Andrews will arrive in Washington as a first-term senator from a deeply conservative state, with a mandate built on healthcare and grassroots organising. Graham’s defeat, meanwhile, leaves Republicans to reckon with how a seat once held by one of their most prominent figures slipped away in a single election cycle.
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